Best tools for SEO: SEOmoz, Ahrefs, Majestic SEO

There are three major great SEO tool suites out there: the giant SEOMoz, the up-and-coming Ahrefs, and the aging but beloved Majestic SEO.  Which tool should you buy?  It depends a lot on your needs and budget.

SEOMoz

SEOMoz is by far the most-used of the three tools.

SEO for Dummies

SEOMoz is geared towards beginner or intermediate SEO professionals.  Its biggest selling point is access to the tips and information on its forums.  With SEOMoz, you aren’t just buying a product.  You’re buying a place within a very experienced and intelligent community.

Similarly, SEOMoz’s toolset is also built for newbies to the SEO game.  SEOMoz’s crawler index, Mozscape, actually throws out the vast majority of the data it collects.  It rejects data on deep pages, bad links, and spam, keeping only the most relevant data.  Its data exports tend to only be about 20% the size of other crawler indices.

This is useful for beginners who are still working on fundamental SEO.  It is less useful for marketers practicing advanced strategies.  It is difficult to determine your competitors’ strategy if you can’t see four fifths of all the possible data.  This can cause you to underestimate your competitors, especially if they are using black hat or spam techniques.

SEOMoz could also do with some more investment in their toolset.  Mozscape in particular is showing its age.  By comparison to its competitors, Mozscape is very slow to pull up data.  This seems like a minor annoyance at first, but over a period of months it could add up to a lot of wasted opportunity cost.

In addition, SEOMoz comes with a killer pricetag.  The lowest package is $99/month, much higher than either AHREFS or Majestic SEO.

Ahrefs

Ahrefs, by contrast, is all about high-technology tools.

The Next Generation

Ahrefs uses some impressive crawling techniques that would have been technologically impossible just a few years ago.  Ahrefs’ data index contains over a trillion data points, and receives a major update 48 times a day, 7 days a week.

This can be helpful if you manage the SEO for huge websites.   With a large website, you want to be able to react to changes in your link profile within hours.  Any delays could cost you money.  Ahrefs makes the time delay between something bad happening and your reaction as short as possible.

Ahrefs is also useful for researching your competitors.  It keeps more data than SEOMoz, making it easier to figure out your competitors’ link-building strategies.  However, Ahrefs still will not pick up spam strategies because its crawlers prioritize high-quality links.

Majestic SEO

If you really need the whole picture, spam, bad links, and all, SEO Majestic has what you need

For Data Junkies

Majestic SEO gives you about three times as much data per export as Ahrefs.  However, because SEO Majestic takes in so much data, it also brings in a lot of data on bad links, dead links, and duplicates.  Roughly 10% of the data in any Majestic SEO export is worthless.

Still, if you know how to see the signals in the noise, then Majestic SEO will give you the most complete picture possible of a given site’s SEO profile.  Majestic’s Historic index also gives you the best analysis over time available.  All this for a great price: Majestic SEO’s basic plan only costs $50.

Whatever you choose, pay month-to-month to start.  It costs a little bit more, but you may want to try a new one as your skills and needs evolve.

Mike manages SEO for SMB clients to large corporations. He leads a growing team of Internet Marketers at TechWyse. Learn more about SEO leader TechWyse here: http://techwyse.com/blog.